CER SEMINAR

Generating hundreds of Tesla magnetic fields inside a laser driven solenoid

Clément Goyon
May 26, 2017, 10:00 - 11:00am, SERF 329

ABSTRACT:

Controlled magnetic fields applied to high-energy density (HED) plasmas is a promising area of research with broad range of application (indirect drive ignition, astrophysical plasmas, particle acceleration…). This growing interest in externally applied B-fields created the need to implement >20 T fields over cm^3. In this talk, laser-driven solenoids are presented as an appealing alternative to pulsed power. The B-field ramps up linearly in time reaching 210 ± 35 T at the end of a 0.75-ns laser drive with 1 TW at 351 nm. A lumped element circuit model combined with an Arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian 3D Multi-Physics Code shows good agreement with the experimental data. A scaling of these results to a National Ignition Facility (NIF) hohlraum target size shows it is possible to achieve several tens of Tesla.